What Every Business Owner Should Know About Digital Marketing

Owning a business is tough. If you’ve started from scratch you’ll know it takes lots of hard work, dedication and sacrifice. You also have to learn things that you never even thought about before. In today’s internet-friendly world, one of these things is digital marketing.

Here we discuss the essentials of digital marketing – from its definition, to targeting your audience, to optimising your ecommerce website, and to curating your website content.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the marketing of your offering via digital mediums, the main one of those being the internet. The benefits of digital marketing are as broad as they are profound. Done with the right expertise and knowhow, you can effectively digitally market your goods and services at costs that were simply not possible previous to the digital age.

Not only that, but with digital marketing you can connect with a far wider audience than ever before, and to a degree that wasn’t even imaginable just a few years ago. It doesn’t stop there, however. With digital marketing, you can also target your audience with an incredible amount of sophistication and accuracy, reaching into people’s homes, pastimes, and even their hopes and desires.

With the advent of ecommerce, digital marketing can be so directly connected to your online store, that an individual can learn of your product or brand and then make a purchase from your website all within a matter of minutes.

The potential of digital marketing is such that for most contemporary businesses it is literally impossible to ignore.

Target your audience

Social media and online content are not the reserve of the young. Irrespective of your offering, it is likely that close to your whole customer base will be regularly online – the internet may even be where your target audience conducts most of its shopping.

Digital marketing can properly focus your efforts on reaching only your target audience, filtering out individuals for age and gender. In fact, by cleverly selecting your keywords – and in the case of PPC marketing, negative keywords – you can go much further, and target individuals that are specifically conducting a Google search to make a purchase of your precise product and/or service. You might wish to target parents looking for school uniforms, teenagers who regularly play sport, toy collectors, women buying a gift for their male partner, business owners that need a project management tool, married couples looking for a weekend away.

The way in which people use and interact with the internet can be used to help them find the product they are looking for. With the right skills and experience, you can meet those people’s needs effectively and at a fantastic ROI.

Create a positive customer experience

How you connect with your customers online will be key to your success. How do they browse? Are they mobile? Are they looking for information or products? Knowing the difference can be crucial in securing sales. You need an online personality to match your presence, and your site needs to be navigable and easy to use. Even with all the right keywords and the best marketing copy, if your ecommerce store isn’t set up right, it can quickly put people off from making a purchase.

It is crucial then to have a website that is not only pretty and informative, but also fast, practical and adaptable. Is your website mobile-friendly? If not, you will frustrate much of your target audience, you’ll miss out on business, and you will also push a potentially loyal customer base towards your competitors. Furthermore, your ability to appear high on the SERPs will likely be affected.

Your content is your voice

Attention spans are short, so keep things brief. You need to capture the interest before you proceed towards a sale. Too much information may be off-putting to some. Also think about your product – if it is more niche, then address it as such by narrowing your focus to draw attention in.

Content needs to be relevant. Getting a lot of clicks is one thing, but if they are not potential customers, then your efforts could be wasted. Relevant, engaging content keeps your audience on-page, reduces the bounce rate, encourages return visits, boosts trust, and, via social media shares, further broadens your appeal.

It is clearly essential to pay close attention to the sheer power of digital marketing and how it can and does transform businesses – levelling the playing field, and creating new, exciting opportunities for those who take it seriously.